Independence Day

Michael Hampton

10 years ago

On July 4 I woke up in Pennsylvania, in a mansion which had served as a station on the Underground Railroad, that network of people and places which helped slaves escape their bondage before and during the Civil War. And I thought that, with the replacement of yesterday’s chattel slavery with today’s universal bondage, it may be time for a new Underground Railroad.

Instead of being owned by plantation owners in the South, people are now owned by governments, which claim total control over every aspect of everyone’s lives, especially control over how much of the product of their labor people must surrender up to their masters. There are no exceptions on this planet known to me, thus universal bondage.

And in many of these places, including the United States, government takes half or more of the product of each person’s labor for its own use. Many such people cannot even afford to eat without dispensation from their masters. Even many who can afford to eat get dispensation. And that dispensation is paid for by the labor taken from others.

Yet this system of universal bondage and redistribution of wealth by violent force is going to collapse, and America, at least, missed its last chance to turn the Titanic when it failed to elect Ron Paul as the Republican nominee to the presidency. The iceberg has been hit and the water is pouring in. All that is left to us now is to try to survive the wreck which will come.

The current best available estimate of inflation of the U.S. dollar is 16%. Contrast that with the bait-and-switch, manipulated “Consumer Price Index” (which, even if accurately calculated, isn’t inflation, but a second-order effect) of 4.2%. Your wallet can tell you that that number isn’t even in the right ballpark. Your wallet is probably telling you that even 16% is on the low side.

And this double-digit rate of actual inflation of the money supply has been going on for several years.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s single biggest expense is not the Iraq war, but Social Security, with $416 billion paid out in fiscal year 2006, and that number increases every year. It’ll begin increasing even more sharply in 2011, when the Baby Boomers begin retiring, and by 2017 or earlier the Ponzi scheme will collapse and the money will simply run out. When that happens, Social Security “will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures,” according to President Bill Clinton in 2000. Yes, they’ve known about these problems that long — even longer, actually — and done nothing.

The value of the U.S. dollar continues to fall, slower or faster, depending on how fast the Federal Reserve runs its printing presses, which it calls “injecting liquidity,” while actual money such as gold and silver continue to maintain their value relative to commodities, even food and gas. That’s right, they are very stable over the long term. A quarter ounce of silver will buy a gallon of gas today, just as it did decades ago. That means that it’s not so much that prices are high as that the dollar is losing its value, and fast enough for you to begin to notice.

Yet there are things people are doing now, today, to protect themselves both from the impending economic collapse, and from government’s tyranny and universal bondage in general.

A new freedom movement has arisen which holds that no one can hold the authority to force anyone to do anything, regardless of whether some so-called representative said in a Congress that it was okay. It is these people who, both now and after the collapse, will show us the way forward. Some are known as libertarians, some as anarcho-capitalists, some as voluntaryists. All share the conviction that coercive government is not an appropriate way to organize a society, and is certainly not a civilized way to relate to people.

Indeed, government has been responsible for more harm to society than any other social construct in human history.

I, however, think the most appropriate term for the people in this movement is that used by those who opposed chattel slavery: abolitionist. It is time to abolish government, that institution which holds us all in universal bondage and which creates all of our societal problems. Whether it is done piecemeal or all at once, humanity will finally be able to move forward to the next stage in civilization: that of interacting with each other peacefully and freely.

In the meantime, there is the government-caused economic collapse to consider. In addition to considering how you will survive the hard times to come, consider that government itself will be crippled by this collapse, and consider how this may be an opportunity to rebuild some of the free, voluntary associations we used to have here and which government usurped, and to build new ones to replace the failing and failed government systems.

The networks of people and voluntary institutions many of us are building now will serve as the new Underground Railroad to help people from all walks of life to escape from universal bondage and to find true freedom. I expect to be persecuted, just as the previous abolitionists were. I expect many of us will be fined, go to jail, or even be killed by our government masters. Yet I cannot be anything but an abolitionist, for it is right and just, and if I must suffer or die for doing what is right, then so be it. You may fine, jail or kill me, but you cannot kill the idea of freedom.